Eras which represent a transition from one major bundle of technologies to another or one dominant economic system to another present peculiar problems for foresighting - rooted as occupants of such periods are in the familiarity of the past, the immediacy of what constitutes the present and the uncertainty of the future, Under such circumstances it is often instructive to read accounts of earlier periods of technological transition. One such account is Oxford economist H. de Beltgens Gibbins's (1901) review of the Industrial Revolution and its progress through the nineteenth century. At the outset of his treatise he entreats those who search for' ... the great and sudden industrial changes of (their) time' to consider that many of the causes had been operating for some time 'beneath the surface'. In other words, look for the historical antecedents for the current 'revolutionary' conditions; much is evolutionary. And what of the nature of changes wrought by 'a revolution in manufactures'? Gibbins's (1901, p . 3) description: 'It was a revolution which has completely changed the face of modem Europe and of the New World, for it introduced a new race of men - the men who work with machinery instead of with their hands, who cluster together in cities instead of spreading over the land in villages and hamlets; the men who trade with those of other nations as readily as with those of their own town'. Ninety years on, society is experiencing another set of revolutionary technological changes - changes which are extending the powers of the mind rather than muscle (Stonier 1983); change which is knowledge-based rather than energy-based; change which has the potential for countering the centralising tendencies characteristic of the Industrial Revolution, but whose dispersive capabilities are yet to be fully explored (Kellerman 1984).